How to Survive Winter

The winter is having one final run at us this week, with what’s potentially a nasty enough storm sweeping down through the Irish Sea, or perhaps along the east coast of Ireland. For once, this looks set to have more influence on Irish weather than that of the UK. Forecasts vary on the exact precipitation; some services are predicting up to 10cm of snow in places, while others predict nothing more than heavy sleet. The whole will be accompanied by strong northerly winds, though, and if it does start to snow, conditions tonight could be unpleasant. It doesn’t look as though there will be sustained cold temperatures, though, so if, like me, you’ve started the spring plantings in the garden, you should be safe enough.

It seems that the winter is not over yet - there’s another cold snap coming in across the British Isles as I write. The Guardian cover the predictions in some detail, but the general gist is that it’s not likely to be as deeply cold as the January cold. There’ll be some snow across the UK, and maybe in the eastern edges of Ireland.

Of course, it’s worth bearing in mind that some of the longest spells of lying snow, and some of the deepest snows recorded in the Isles, have fallen in February. The snow that fell in February 1947 lasted more than a month in Ireland.

As the cold gets stuck in - and some weather models are saying it could stay for weeks more - here’s a helpful (if slightly tongue-in-cheek) set of frequently asked questions for dealing with snow, from the Guardian.

For those in parts of the UK affected by snow, with public transport out of action or badly delayed in many areas, cycling may actually be a workable way to get around. Matt Seaton, writing in the Guardian, has a timely article on cycling in snow. Be careful out there!

It’s been cold, properly wintery cold, since about the 18th of December. It’s being touted as the coldest spell in Ireland for the last 50 years, and while there haven’t been completely record-breaking low temperatures, numbers around the -9°C mark have been recorded. I’ll also point out for my North European and North American readers that our humidity hovers around the 90% mark, so it feels colder than those numbers would indicate.

My own electronic thermometer recorded a low of -4.7°C on Christmas Morning, and it has since hit -4.5°C on the morning of the 2nd of January. It was -2.6°C when we were leaving the house yesterday morning. The Royal Canal has had ice on it pretty consistently since the 23rd of December, and nearly all precipitation has been as snow or ice pellets, with some occasional sleet to liven things up. Mostly, it’s been dry.

The weather forecasts on some services are reading like science fiction (Kim Stanley Robinson, to be precise). Metcheck is predicting -8°C during the morning of Saturday 8th January, and indeed, -10°C on the following Monday morning. These dates are more than three days out, and as such are unreliable, but it’s a fair indicator that it will continue to be cold.

Metcheck also says that there will be snow in my area by tomorrow morning, or at least, tomorrow afternoon. Sometime, anyway.

yr.no, a service less given to histrionics than Metcheck, agrees that there will be snow in Kildare by tomorrow morning. It doesn’t extend to the early days of next week, but predicts a much more likely -4°C for Saturday. It’s hard to remember, somtimes, though, that it’s just using a different model or ensemble of models, and isn’t inherently more reliable - it underestimated the cold on the morning of January 2nd by quite a long shot, for instance.

Neither of the services is predicting much above 3°C for the foreseeable future, though. For a country where that’s the average minimum for January, that’s quite notable.

The 13th of December is still more than three days out, and therefore weather predictions are not reliable. However, most of the forecasts models seem to agree that the UK and Ireland will see some fairly cold, clear weather starting from next week, and lasting for at least a few days - temperatures dipping below freezing overnight, and not rising much past 4°C during daylight.

Some of the weather discussion boards are hoping for snow in Ireland during this period. Much as I’d like to agree, I don’t think we’ll see snow this side of January, but we’ll certainly see some hard frosts. Weather should remain fairly clear in and around these temperatures, so ice on roads shouldn’t be a major problem - but frost itself can be dangerous enough, so be careful with travel for Christmas.

The British Isles have seen some spectacularly unpleasant weather over the last few weeks, with storms and massive amounts of rainfall. Cumbria in the UK, and most places west of the Shannon in Ireland, have seen serious flooding. Now it looks as though we’re coming into the first real cold snap of the year, with predictions that temperatures almost everywhere will drop below freezing on Monday night or Tuesday morning. Snow was seen in the Wicklow Mountains last night, and is likely in parts of Scotland as well. Where these cold temperatures follow rain, ice on roads is a risk, so drive carefully, and turn dip lights on at all times.

We had the first frost of the winter yesterday morning, the 7th of October. Roofs of houses, cars, a touch on exposed grass, but nothing heavy as yet. If we get the same kind of hoar-frost this year as last, I’ll try to get some pictures of it - it looked magnificent on some of the trees. This morning, it was chilly again, but not as cold - there was nothing more than a low-lying fog in places.

For the first time this autumn, the Metcheck service has something on its FrostRisk pages for the areas I check. In fact, it’s giving a 55% chance of frost in my home area tonight:

And Met Éireann, although they don’t use the word frost, are saying temperatures might drop to 4C, which is just about low enough. Time to get the tomatoes in, I reckon…

Last year, we had the first frost on the 27th of October (and here’s a fantastic frost photograph by Wojciech Szczygieł, taken near Courtown in Co. Wexford).

Average first frost dates are hard to find online, but the general feeling seems to be that up until the mid-nineties, first frosts happened in late September. These days, as evidenced above, they don’t happen until late October, and sometimes early November. However, last winter set into being fairly cold following the late start.

The lowest temperatures in Ireland - including the record of -19.1°C in 1881, at the rather stunning Markree Castle, which is well-equipped for winter weather - have always happened in January, according to Met Eireann. So it’s pretty unlikely that we’re going to get a drop to sudden very cold temperatures. Nevertheless, the possibility of an early frost, in comparison to the last decade at least, is out there - there are predictions of temperatures of 4°C for the end of September already. So watch those tomatoes!